The present invention is related to prescription drugs, and in particular, to a system and method for identifying new therapy starts for a patient based on aggregate information collected for a number of patients over a period of time.
The pharmaceutical industry spends billions of dollars to promote new prescription drugs to physicians, dentists, etc., (collectively referred to as health care specialists) having permission from Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to prescribe them. A large portion of the industry's promotional spending budget is allocated to sales representatives and promotional messages. For example, using in-person selling techniques, a pharmaceutical sales representative attempts to persuade a health care specialist to prescribe a new medication (drug) for treating a patient with a particular new ailment or, alternatively, to switch to a new medication which is believed to be more effective than the old one in treating the existing condition.
Typically, the sales representative meets a health care specialist and makes a presentation on the benefits of the new prescription drug, but unlike in standard retail sales, no immediate transaction takes place at the conclusion of the meeting. The success of the sales representative or promotional message is determined only when the health care specialist initially treats the patient with the medication. In this situation, the health care specialist's prescribing behavior may have been affected by the sales representative or by the promotional message, and determining the impact of the sales technique and content is of utmost importance to the pharmaceutical companies. It enables them to optimize marketing strategies and to properly motivate and compensate their sales and marketing forces.
Conventionally, to evaluate the effectiveness of the sales force and promotional messages, newly prescribed drugs are detected on the basis of new prescriptions that may be represented by new pieces of paper. Namely, when presented with a new prescription on a piece of paper, a pharmacist enters information on the prescribed drug into a pharmacist's computer database. This entry is then treated by the pharmaceutical companies as a newly prescribed drug, a so-called new therapy or therapy start. In reality, however, the piece of paper submitted by the patient may have been the prescription for a previous drug, a so-called continuation therapy, presented to the pharmacist to renew or refill the existing medication.
Furthermore, if a patient for various reasons changes pharmacies to fill his/her prescriptions, it appears as if the new therapy has occurred with respect to that patient. That is, when the current pharmacy processes the current prescription, no information is conveyed to the pharmaceutical companies about the patient's previous prescriptions at another pharmacy or pharmacies. Thus, while the prescribed drug is actually a continuation therapy, the pharmaceutical companies are unaware of this situation and regard the prescription as a therapy start.
As explained above, the conventional collection of information on newly prescribed drugs suffers from several disadvantages. A need, therefore, exists for a system and method that overcome the above, as well as other, disadvantages of the conventional techniques.